President Trump in an interview broadcast early Wednesday argued against gun control, saying that unarmed civilians are “sitting ducks.”
“When somebody has a gun illegally and nobody else has a gun because the laws are that you can’t have a gun, those people are gone. They have no choice, they have no chance,” Trump told Piers Morgan on ITV’s “Good Morning Britain.”
“The people that obey the laws … those people are sitting ducks,” he added.{mosads}
The president did say he doesn’t like gun suppressors, also known as silencers, and would “think about” banning them after one was used in a Virginia Beach, Va. shooting in which 12 people were killed last week.
Trump also argued that a mass shooting near Paris would never have occurred if someone “on the other side” had a gun.
“If there was a gun on the other side, if one or two or three of those people had a gun, it would have never happened,” he said.
Morgan, however, noted that “more people were shot dead in America that week than have died from guns in Paris since the Second World War.”
He added that he has never “understood why anyone in America needs a semiautomatic AR-15 assault rifle.”
Trump responded that people use them for “entertainment.”
While the Trump administration has banned bump stocks, it has otherwise been resistant to gun control efforts.